Fresh food in a pandemic

Lisa MacDougall holds two flats of kale inside one of her many greenhouses at Mighty Food Farm in Shaftsbury, Vt. photo by Joan K. Lentini

 

By TRACY FRISCH
Contributing writer

As the Covid-19 outbreak began to shut down the nation last month, the region’s farmers and food producers suddenly found some of their customers and marketing outlets evaporating, with restaurants, schools, colleges and even some farmers markets temporarily shuttered.

But with lots of people doing more cooking as they follow health officials’ pleas to stay home, the demand for fresh, local ingredients seems stronger than ever.

That’s left direct-market farmers scrambling to find new ways to get their products into the hands of consumers while minimizing human contact.

They’ve set up delivery services, online ordering systems, and staggered at-the-farm pickup schedules that keep local customers from encountering one another.
Some farms whose customers are mainly in metropolitan New York City are figuring out new ways to get their wares to the center of the worst coronavirus outbreak, with at least one farm now shipping its meat and other products directly to consumers’ doors by UPS.
“Farmers as entrepreneurs have jumped right in,” said Margaret Moulton, executive director of Berkshire Grown, an organization devoted to supporting local food and agriculture. “They are setting up online stores and arranging for customer pickups outside. Some farmers are setting up new farm stands.”

In places where they’re being allowed to operate, the organizations that run local farmers markets are grappling with how to proceed – and how best to do so while minimizing the risk of spreading the coronavirus.

Berkshire Grown, which holds monthly winter markets, canceled its March 21 market. It’s normally held in a school gymnasium, but all the schools were closed.
“We are looking into workable options for an outdoor venue, advance ordering, etcetera,” Moulton said.

Beyond the task of getting their products to market, some larger farms also are facing new operational challenges in their own fields. Some who rely on seasonal foreign workers fear the supply of those workers will be cut off by travel restrictions. And some worry that farmworkers who live in close quarters could be at risk if Covid-19 makes it onto their farms.

 

Inventing a Plan B
For many food producers in western New England and eastern New York, the wakeup call came in mid-March, when a number of winter farmers markets in the region abruptly ceased operations to help stem the spread of the coronavirus.

When the Saratoga Springs Winter Farmers’ Market canceled its March 20 indoor market, Pleasant Valley Farm, a vegetable farm in the Washington County town of Argyle, quickly announced it would offer free home delivery with a $15 minimum through an online pre-order, pre-pay system.

The farm’s owners, Paul and Sandy Arnold, spread word of the service through an email newsletter they already were sending to customers from the farmers markets that have been their major source of income for more than 30 years.

The next week, the Arnolds announced some changes in their new distribution system. The Saratoga Springs Farmers’ Market had resumed operations, having moved outdoors six weeks earlier than planned, and their other winter farmers market continued to operate inside. The Arnolds decided to limit home delivery to residents of Saratoga Springs. They also started accepting pre-orders for the two farmers markets where they sell, and they began offering an additional pick-up site at another location.

At Laughing Earth, a 175-acre farm in the Rensselaer County hamlet of Cropseyville, Annie and Zack Metzger raise livestock, vegetables and cut flowers for the Troy Waterfront Farmers’ Market as well as for the farm’s member-customers. When the Troy market shut down March 14, the Metgers had enough warning to set up an online store.

“We just used a Google app,” Annie Metzger said. “It was free and easy.”
They set up their online store to allow customers to place orders and pay electronically, with a choice of home delivery or at-the-farm pickup by appointment. On the Saturday the farmers market was suspended, they offered home delivery within a 15-mile radius of their farm, an area that encompasses the cities of Albany and Troy.

“The amount of support last weekend was really encouraging,” Metzger said. “We were able to make up the income that we would have made at the market.”

 

Lisa MacDougall of Mighty Food Farm in Shaftsbury, Vt., checks the spinach plants in one of her greenhouses. photo by Joan K. Lentini

 

 

Working at home
Lisa MacDougall decided to try to reduce her risk of coronavirus by staying put at Mighty Food Farm, where she grows organic vegetables. The farm in Shaftsbury, Vt., operates on the model of community-supported agriculture, in which customers pay in advance for a share of each year’s harvest.

MacDougall said she expects more people will be buying memberships in CSA farms. Because of concerns about the spread of Covid-19, farmers markets will have to set up new safety protocols, and some may not be able to open, she said.

“We will have to see how long the pandemic goes on for,” she said. “But the reality is that … farmers will be pre-packing custom orders for customers.”

MacDougall and her crew are providing their customers with food via a pre-order pickup system. They leave packages outside their building, scheduling customer pickups one at a time to avoid encounters that might inadvertently spread the virus. To handle orders, the farm is using the online platform Farmigo, and MacDougall said she’s been pleased with how the system works.
She said she encourages other farmers to update their websites and use social media to communicate with current and potential customers about changes in their delivery systems. Facebook, she said, “reaches my local community better” than Instagram. With Facebook, a farmer can post ads that target people in a local geographic area, she added.

More demand than supply?
At a time when shoppers are finding empty shelves in some supermarket aisles, farmers around the region say more people are showing up at farm stands and signing up to buy produce throughout the season from CSA operations.

The increased demand might put farmers in a stronger bargaining position with wholesale buyers such as food co-ops.

Chris Cashen of the Farm at Miller’s Crossing, a large, diversified organic operation in the Columbia County town of Claverack, said the farm sold out of everything it brought to the Hudson farmers market in mid-March.

“I’ve had people calling to order 50-pound boxes of potatoes,” Cashen said.
Customers were also asking for large amounts of beef, but the farm was approaching the end of its grass-fed beef inventory, and its cows were just starting to calf.

Cashen said his farm has also been getting more requests from wholesale customers than it can supply at winter’s end.

“We only have 500 or 600 pounds of carrots left,” he said. “I could have sold our carrots five times over.”

He decided to hold out.

“I’d rather make individual retail customers happy by selling 5 pounds here and 10 pounds there than sell to wholesale customers,” he explained. “There’s double the money in that too.”

 

Status of farmers markets
Many farmers in New York breathed a sigh of relief in the third week of March, when Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that the state considers farmers markets to be essential services, like grocery stores, that should continue to operate during the Covid-19 shutdown. Massachusetts made a similar determination.

But in Vermont, Agriculture Secretary Anson Tebbetts said March 25 that farmers markets should not continue operations under Gov. Phil Scott’s stay-at-home directive.

“Outdoor markets would likely attract large gatherings that would congregate close together,” Tebbetts told Vermont Public Radio. “There is risk of person-to-person contact when exchanging goods.”

Tebbetts said his agency would instead work with farmers and market managers to set up pick-up and delivery services for farm products.

As of late March, the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont was urging its members to contact the governor and push to classify farmers markets as essential, allowing them to open with appropriate precautions. At the same time, the organization has been trying to fill the void for farmers who suddenly lack access to farmers markets by helping them make connections to online marketplaces, food hubs and other farms that might distribute their products.

Even in New York and Massachusetts, the decision to classify farmers markets as essential services does not guarantee the markets will keep operating. Individual markets have their own governing boards, and some may decide to close.

Others have been forced to close, at least temporarily, because they’re held at locations, such as schools or colleges, that are no longer available because of the pandemic.

Market boards and local governments will have to parse the meaning of declarations about essential services. Some markets may choose not to include vendors who offer nonfood items, alcohol or prepared foods.

Reducing risk
Where they’re allowed to operate, farmers markets are trying to work out how to hold the safest events possible.

In the Hudson Valley village of Cold Spring, 50 miles north of New York City, the local farmers market moved outdoors early, on March 14. By the following Saturday, new precautions were in place. Vendor booths form one long line, with a one-way entrance and a one-way exit, and a limited number of people allowed in at one time. Only one household may visit each vendor table at one time, vendors pre-bag all items, and customers are asked not to touch produce or other products. The market is providing contact information for all vendors to encourage customers to email or text orders in advance, and it’s looking into online apps to facilitate pre-orders for future markets.

In Massachusetts, Moulton said Berkshire Grown is urging the state to change its rules to allow online advance payments with EBT (electronic benefit transfer) cards. Many people, she said, use Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to pay for produce at farmers markets, but the state’s current rules require these payments to be processed on site. Allowing advance payment, she said, would reduce interpersonal contact and possible exposure to the coronavirus at farmers markets.

On many farms that operate under the CSA model, produce pickup days for member-customers have traditionally been a fun social event.

“We’ll have 100 people here at a time on Wednesdays,” said Metzger, of Laughing Earth, recalling prior seasons. “Often the whole family comes. People hang out in the picking garden. Parents with little kids meet up and play.”

But all of this will change during the Covid-19 outbreak. Instead of market-style distribution days, CSA farmers are contemplating two different options – either pre-boxing standard shares for all customers or using online platforms to allow shareholders to pre-order what they want.

At Cambridge Corner Farm in Cambridge, N.Y., Stephen Holbrook and Julie Callahan already serve their CSA members using a pre-order model. They also participate in a small farmers market that Callahan manages in nearby Greenwich.

Holbrook said he is impressed with “how well local growers and producers have done in accepting the challenges of getting their product to customers during the pandemic.”
And customers, he said, have been very supportive.

“Even without the pandemic, this is what supporting the local food system should be like -- high demand and lots of support,” Holbrook said.

He said he views the Covid-19 crisis as “a wakeup call” that the nation’s food system is not as durable as many people suppose.

“The country is closing the borders so workers can’t get in,” Holbrook said. “We have one little disruption in the food system, and grocery stores have shortages.”

Feeding an outbreak’s center
At Windflower Farm in Cambridge, Ted and Jan Blomgren market their produce through nine community-supported agriculture groups in New York City as well as under several United Way contracts to supply fresh produce to food pantries in the city. They had 1,150 CSA shareholders in the city last year and have three “drop and go” sites for food pantries that require minimal handling by the farm.

After 15 to 20 years in operation, Windflower Farm’s core groups of member-customers are well established, and they continue to have high demand for memberships even in the midst of the Covid-19 outbreak, Ted Blomgren said.

“When we opened the first four sites” for the season, he said, “the enrollments came in really fast.”

But many of the CSA groups in the city that buy their produce have distribution sites in schools and churches that are now closed because of the pandemic.

“Before opening these sites, we may need to wade through a bureaucracy that’s also shut down,” Blomgren said.

Because of Covid-19, Blomgren said Windflower Farm will stop offering open, farmers-market-style distribution to its CSA customers. But he has been reluctant to deliver pre-boxed shares in new cardboard boxes every week, which he sees as costly, polluting and wasteful.

After getting assurances from two professionals that plastic totes and other surfaces can be adequately cleaned, he is contemplating an assembly process to prepare CSA share bags at each site. Someone would hand out those bags to people in line, who would wait outdoors. In late March, with the first delivery more than two months away, there’s time to work out the details.
Another issue on Blomgren’s mind is how to communicate better with customers during the disease outbreak, as CSA members will not be able to interact directly with farmers or attend the open house Windflower Farm normally hosts each year.
“Now it’s time to play up the positive side of social media,” he said.

 

Door-to-door delivery
From the Washington County town of Jackson, Lewis Waite Farm markets its own grass-fed beef and pork along with products from a number of other farmers and food producers in its region and delivers these foods through CSA groups in New York City, about 175 miles to the south.
“Sales are booming,” said Nancy Brown, the farm’s co-owner, even as coronavirus outbreak was shutting down New York City in late March.

But because of the coronavirus, Lewis Waite has had to change its distribution model.
“We’ve stopped driving a vanload of food orders to New York City and dropping multiple orders off at CSA sites where people would have to mingle in order to pick up their order,” Brown explained.

Instead, the farm is offering home delivery via United Parcel Service for its New York City customers and local delivery for its customers from area farmers markets.

Because people are staying home, shipping direct is the only way distant customers can receive local small-batch foods direct from the farm.

“There is a whole new way to pack our orders, and we must treat each one individually in its own insulated box,” Brown said.

Though they have tried many ways, they just can’t ship eggs, she added.
Because of the changes, Brown said the farm is working harder to pack orders and keep regional suppliers’ products on hand.

Some producers already deliver to Lewis Waite without any human contact: A bakery leaves the bread order in the foyer, and a regional distributor of farm products will put frozen items into the farm’s freezer.

Brown’s employees also drive around to gather foods from different farms and food producers – for example, picking up milk jugs from a local dairy farm that bottles its milk.

 

Willing and able hands
Because of the coronavirus, some farms around the region are facing new uncertainty about whether they’ll have the workers needed to support their normal operations.

With many people laid off from restaurants, bars and other businesses that have been forced to shut down, some farmers are reporting an unprecedented pool of potential employees.

“We have people pounding on the door,” said Brian Denison of Denison Farm in Schaghticoke, where he and his wife, Justine, raise naturally grown vegetables for farmers markets and member-customers of their own large CSA operation.

Many of the region’s larger vegetable farms obtain some of their farm labor through the federal H-2A guest worker program, which allows seasonal agricultural workers from countries such as Mexico, Guatemala and Jamaica to work at farms in the United States.

But because of the pandemic, some farmers who rely on H-2A workers aren’t sure when -- or even if -- their foreign workers will show up.

Chris Cashen and Katie Smith of the Farm at Miller’s Crossing submitted their H-2A paperwork early this year and were expecting four seasonal workers through the program. The four men, who have worked at their farm in the past, were scheduled to arrive from Guatemala around St. Patrick’s Day, but their flight was canceled after the Guatemalan president closed down the airport to discourage the spread of Covid-19.

Cashen said he and Smith don’t know whether they need to start worrying.
“Information is scarce,” he said.

For the time being, they’ve started calling around in an effort to find workers locally. Cashen said they have some good prospects, including a cousin and her husband a couple towns away and a nearby apple grower’s packinghouse workers, who are not needed full time in the spring. Even in the worst-case scenario, he said, “I can probably get through the planting season with a patchwork crew.”

But once the farm is simultaneously harvesting, transplanting and weeding, he added, it will need the superior skills of the experienced H-2A workers.

“They know our farm, and they can manage themselves once they’re shown what to do,” Cashen said.

Local, less experienced workers cannot replace them, he said. And the need is greater this year because Cashen is recovering from recent knee surgery.

Because of the coronavirus outbreak, the United States has temporarily closed its embassy and consulates in Mexico and its embassy in Jamaica, two of the countries that supply many agricultural workers under the H-2A program.

 

Taking precautions
At Windflower Farm, Blomgren said local workers make up the majority of the farm team, though it also gets some seasonal help through the H-2A program. For the past 15 years, the farm’s foreign workers have all come from one particular extended family in Mexico. This year, the farm applied to bring in five people from this family, but Blomgren said he’s not sure whether they’ll all be able to come.

Some farmers also are focusing on how to reduce the risk of coronavirus transmission at their farms.

At Mighty Food Farm, MacDougall said her highest concern is the health of her crew, all of whom live locally. She is training employees on the farm’s new sanitization standards and what she described as “very strict” hand-washing protocols. The farm is sanitizing surfaces multiple times a day.

MacDougall said she is “basically not leaving the farm,” which she says is on “lockdown” except for the employees coming in daily. One of the challenges will be dealing with incoming crewmembers later in the season, she said.

Mark Anderson, a partner in a 1,400-cow dairy farm in New York’s Washington County, has also turned his attention to the need to prevent farmworkers from contracting the virus. Anderson said the farm’s owners are careful about who comes onto the farm, and they have begun regularly disinfecting bathrooms and break rooms. They’ve also done some shopping for their workers.
Anderson signed up to attend a Cornell University webinar last month on Covid-19. The webinar recommended that dairy farmers educate their employees about the virus and put up Spanish-language posters about the disease and how to prevent exposure.

With workers living in shared housing on the farm, the virus would be hard to stop if one person became infected. Anderson said that as a sort of insurance, the farm is retaining a couple of extra employees, a cousin and a niece of existing workers, who came looking for jobs. They are housed in an apartment, separate from the other employees, to help keep them from getting infected, should an outbreak occur.